Appeals court upholds FCC's net neutrality order
politico.com
politico.com
Utility-style regulation gives regulators plenary authority over the internet - meaning full and complete. Their power to do this or to forbid that is highly discretionary and essentially boundless.
This in turn gives a gatekeeper role to the regulators: you play by their rules or you don't play. And that means they have final say over what happens across the internet, at least within U.S. jurisdiction.
So today they say net neutrality rules.
Tomorrow maybe it is price controls in the name of consumer fairness. Or maybe it is mandated compliance with government snooping orders in the name of national security. Or who knows what not?
Why not? With a utility-style regulatory framework, you essentially have a form of administrative law run wild, legally speaking. Standards are exceedingly vague, power is wildly broad, and (in the end) he who has the most power and pull to control the regulators winds up having the final say over what the law is or is not as it affects the internet.
This is the exact antithesis of the largely hands-off idea of what the government could do with respect to the internet over the past several decades.
Of course law tends to conform in the short term to what people want and, today, most people truly do want a free and open internet. Therefore, the risk of any existential threat to internet freedom is either minimal or non-existent in the short term.
But if your idea of preserving maximum internet freedom is in effect to place a loaded gun to its head and then declare it is not a problem because it is the good guys who control it and who therefore will use it only for good purposes, then you have what you want with utility-style regulation of the internet.
It might just work great as long as the good guys are in control. But what happens when it changes some day? And, if you think it cannot, then you have far, far more faith in human nature than I can possibly summon.
Welcome to the brave new world.
Yes, there is a risk that the regulators will declare any number of rules for any number of reasons. Yes, regulatory capture of regulators is a real problem. The solution to these two problems is not to cede control to multinational corporations. Your lack of faith in human nature should extend to all humans, not just ones who are the apparatus of the state.
It's not that there's some reason to preternaturally trust corporations and to distrust the state, it's that the apparatus of the state is infinitely more powerful. If a corporation acts unethically, you lose the benefits and service it provides. If the state acts unethically, you lose your freedom and/or your life. That's a colossal difference.
Likewise, if the choice is between Google controlling access to the internet and Chinese-style regulation controlling access to the internet, there's really no choice at all: who would pick Chinese internet service over Google Fiber? And make no mistake: with utility-style regulation the only boundary between the FCC and the PRC is "the people", and if this year's election has shown anything, they are a fickle and largely ignorant bunch. "Utility-style regulation" isn't an epithet because the internet shouldn't be treated as a utility; it's an epithet because utility regulation over the past hundred years has been absolutely disastrous, enabling the supreme power of corporations, not limiting it. It's really, really sad to see the internet falling into the hands of telecoms and the FCC.
You're committing the fallacy of the excluded middle. There is a massive gulf between unregulated behavior of publicly-held companies and authoritarian dictatorship by an unelected body, and the USA is somewhere there in the middle.
oh I see this is an alias for that. false dilemma, false dichotomy and excluded middle are apparently all the same thing.
So what's your understanding of those terms? Mine is identical to that of treehau5.
Several thousands people who died in Bhopal on Dec 2, 1984 might think otherwise. Or 2,209 people who died in Johnstown, PA on 1889 when South Fork Dam failed. Or another 502 people killed on Jun 29, 1995 when Sampoong Department Store collapsed. Or...
But I digress -- in any free society people will eventually cause horrible things to happen, it just seems to me that the government inevitably causes much worse things to happen.
Now you say even unethical corporations normally kill much fewer people than unethical governments. Which is true. But I have to ask, why do unethical corporations kill so few people? After all, they're all led by the same greedy people. It's not like CEOs magically become conscientious and say "Well, we can make billions of dollars by screwing all these poor people, but fuck it if we end up killing them!"
The answer: governments. Governments keep corporations in line so that they can't get away with killing people. Where a government is run by better people, corporations tend to not kill people, because they'll face consequences.
So, you are right that an incompetent government can be much more dangerous. However, one way such a government can kill people is by colluding with corporations and voluntarily relinquishing its authority (and duty) to police them as a government should. When you're limiting the government's power over corporations, in some situations, you could be in fact ensuring that the government remains incompetent.
There is active push back from a whole host of multinational megacorps for any relatively toothless threat represented by todays FCC what should concern you is that those same forces are actively largely ok with the real existential threats to freedom on the internet today.
I am 44 years old, which means I remember growing up at a time when you were not allowed to own a telephone -- because AT&T exercised its corporate monopoly to control what you could plug into your AT&T phone line, and they would only permit that to be an AT&T phone, and they would not ever sell you an AT&T phone, they would only rent you one at an exorbitant price. And they didn't bother to provide you any variety in models, because why would they? There's one phone, that is what you get.
Also, if you wanted to call someone in a different area code, then I hope you are ready to shell out some cash...
If it weren't for state-exercised power, it is quite possible that things would still be this way.
I do not consider today's situation a disaster at all, relatively speaking. (For sure there are still many un-ideal things about it.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
But for the most part, it is just that AT&T kept buying smaller companies, which is just what happens in capitalism when one party starts to win, which is why checks on capitalism are necessary.
In no way is the free market responsible for the AT&T monopoly.
https://mises.org/library/austrian-monopoly-theory-%E2%80%94...
The difference is that in a competitive market, this self-interest happens to lead producers to do what is in the public interest, but in the monopoly case it generally leads to lower production and higher prices than would be optimal. For more explanation, here's a Wikipedia article that jibes with my college Intro to Econ class:
I get what you mean, but at the same time, a monopoly these are not. Just because there are companies that have a very large market share does not mean there are no alternatives.
> The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser sales. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of Internet Explorer. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
"petition for rulemaking was filed with the FCC by Skype, requesting the FCC to apply the Carterfone regulations to the wireless industry—which would mean that OEMs, portals and others will be able to offer wireless devices and services without the cellular operators needing to approve the handsets. However, on 1 April 2008, FCC chairman Kevin Martin indicated that he would oppose Skype's request.[3]"
That's pretty much what the Open Internet Order (both the 2010 one that was, except for transparency provisions, struck down and the current one that was just upheld by the same court that struck down the earlier one) does.
> You don't have to have utility-style control,
Which, largely, the FCC isn't doing here. Now, the FCC had invoke the provisions which allow utility-style control because the courts previously struck down its attempt to institute similar "people can plug legal devices into their internet connections and access legal content over their internet connection" rules without invoking the "telecommunication service" common carrier, "utility-style" provisions of the law.
But, while the details of the current order are different from the 2010 order (for one, more of the provisions apply to mobile broadband in the same ways as fixed broadband, because that market had matured in the intervening time period such that the argument that it was too new and evolving to know if the same style of regulation would be appropriate), it mostly doesn't apply "utility style" regulation, even though it invokes authority which would allow utility-style regulation.
It seems that someone put a bunch of common explanations on a web page and stuck the word "fallacy" after all of them so that they could use it to try to win arguments with easily-intimidated persons.
Many situations exist wherein a series of steps could superficially be arranged in a progression or slope between points a and b but in fact individual steps have different costs and benefits and are in fact independently good or bad.
Often those arguing for/against a subset of the points in the graph have good arguments for/against then some jerk goes and implies that if you allow point 1-3 on the graph somehow by magic you will eventually arrive at point 37. They ignore the fact that its possible and in fact reasonable to support point 1-3 and skip right to the extreme and absurd.
They neatly bypass any and all relevant arguments in favor of 1-3. This is destructive to conversation because you can use it in nearly any situation. It is especially frequently used in anything involving government because somehow all roads that don't lead to anarchy somehow lead to hitler.
Its frequently useful to just point out the obvious fallacy and move on rather than giving a longer treatment because such tracks are frequently useless and drag the entire discussion inevitably towards stupidity.
This is a straw man argument, that's not the only choice, in fact it's not even the actual choice facing us right now.
>it's an epithet because utility regulation over the past hundred years has been absolutely disastrous, enabling the supreme power of corporations, not limiting it.
This is not universally true. In the comparatively economically conservative Southeast where power generation and the electric grid have been regulated as public utilities for as long as anyone can remember, there was never a temptation to experiment with deregulation as in CA, and no small bit of schadenfreude when Enron wrecked havoc on the CA energy system as a result.
Stability is an (maybe the most) important characteristic of national economic infrastructure that is susceptible to systemic risk. It enables the forces of innovation to confidently build on top of it - capital formation, ROI forecasting, planning & investment, long-term credit extension to wealth-creating industries, etc. Introducing shocks and instability into the base layer infrastructure makes that wealth creation activity much more difficult and constrained.
According to whom? The Internet is delivered to homes on top of existing regulated utilities, that are quite essential to our survival. But I can use the Internet anywhere with a sufficient enough population density if I pay for a wireless data plan. Because the true value of the Internet is global availability of information, access to that information doesn't need to be tied to a physical address in the same way a life-saving device like a telephone does. Really energy and sanitation is what we should be thinking of. They're truly necessary utilities.
According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility:
Broadband internet services (both fixed-line and mobile) are increasingly being included within the definition.
As for which things are "truly necessary", that definition is not universal. In The Netherlands, over 90% of consumer banking by now is done over the Internet. That has lead to the closing of over 30% of bank branch offices, with associated cost savings. Those savings would not have been possible had Internet access not been classified as a public utility, because bank access was similarly regulated.
> A public utility (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service.
Who is the organization that maintains the infrastructure of the Internet? Does it include my cable modem? My router? Why or why not?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Paoloner...
And on point: here in Sweden we have both privately owned and state owned broadband infrastructure, and while it's hard to prove, i'm convinced that this came out of the university networks (SUNET) building out the framework for this in university cities in the 90s and back.
As a result of this we had good grounds for competing ISPs which today is about 12 nation wide (for 10M people), on top of which there are usually a few per city also competing for customers.
This leads to me being able to choose between 16 (!) different ISP:s on my fiber I installed last month, which will cost me $38 USD/mo for uncapped 100/100 Mbps or $89 USD/mo for uncapped 1000/100 Mbps.
It has also been shown that cities with a state owned network infrastructure leads to 20-30% cheaper broadband. I can't find the specific study, but it's referenced here: http://skl.se/tjanster/press/nyheter/nyhetsarkiv2016/overens...
Nothing is a utility until it's made one.
This is a popular conception but until this recent FCC order it was mostly wrong.
Most people in the U.S. access the Internet over 4 types of physical networks:
- cable TV coax
- fiber optics to the house
- DSL over existing telephone lines
- wireless signals (4G or WiFi, mostly)
Of those, only the telephone lines were an existing regulated utility. Cable networks, fiber networks, and wireless networks were not classified as utilities and were exempt from most regulations that we take for granted on the phone network, like being able to purchase and use telephone service if you want it, or calling whoever you want without being blocked or paying extra.
> But I can use the Internet anywhere with a sufficient enough population density if I pay for a wireless data plan.
Now you can. Until now, wireless data companies were under no legal obligation to sell to you, and under no obligation to serve you any particular website you request.
In short, it seems the law is catching up to where you already thought it was.
In particular, there's no reason why IP-based networks ought to be viewed as less important than telephone service, given that telephony is rapidly becoming just one of many services that happens to be delivered over IP networks.
In a perfect world, competition and crowd dynamics maintain openness because no single actor can influence the overall market. Unfortunately, in practice we don't see perfect competition which leaves many angles for sufficiently large market participants to influence the overall market.
There are examples from relatively recent history where regulation had varying degrees of success curbing monopolistic exploits. So I wouldn't call this a brave new world so much a slight return to the "Trust Busting" regulatory days which more or less went defunct in the last 30 odd years.
While I hear your point and I think your reasoning is sound, this particular event happens to be a step in the right direction and I am not keen to throw the baby out with the bath water in this specific instance.
Internet access is provided by cable and phone companies. Those companies are utility companies. They have government sponsored monopolies. It was inevitable that the internet access the utility companies provide would eventually see utility-style regulation.
Net neutrality sucks. It's a shit solution. The real solution is ISP competition. If consumers were able to choose from a dozen competing ISPs then net neutrality and all this regulation wouldn't be necessary.
The true puzzle is how do we enable ISP competition. It's not easy. But it's true solution.
When profit margins are that high capital finds a way. What capital can't do is chop through red tape, burdensome regulation, and noncompetitive system.
Your investors aren't crazy. You challenge titans! But your difficulty isn't going to be technical. It's going to be those titans doing everything in their (significant) power to stop competition. They want to protect their 97% margin after all!
Aside from that, if you're anything like us, you will be reinvesting those profits into expanding and growing your network.
To be competitive in today's market you need to be running fiber. Depending on where you're located, fiber is scarce and running it isn't cheap.
Yeah, the equipment was probably expensive, but compared to what? Laying your own infrastructure? Not even close.
This regulation was undone under the Bush administration and most of the independent DSL operators died shortly thereafter, leaving consumers with a choice between the incumbent telephone company and the incumbent cable company, in most cases, for broadband.
In short, when the market was regulated, there was competition and consumer choice. When the regulation was removed in response to industry lobbying efforts, consumer choice disappeared.
You argue like market-based solution are not subject to the darker side of human nature, when, in fact, the conflict of interest, especially in a natural oligopoly like terrestrial internet, is one of it's fundamental pillars.
The problem is with an oligopoly of effectively 0-2 providers in the majority of the US you really don't have a choice.
I'd prefer to have the gun in the hand of the government instead of a corporation who decided to stop investing in infrastructure and just milk the situation.
You really need substantial competition (10+ providers) for the free market to function.
This is the most salient point. I would completely agree with OP (and I am generally in favor of fewer regulations) were we all able to choose our providers.
Yes.
LA 2015 Election:
https://ballotpedia.org/Paul_Krekorian
AT&T - $14,400 Verizon - $7,753
2 of his top 5 contributors were the local ISPs.
Unfortunately there aren't any good data sources that provide country-wide coverage of this information but I'd be willing to bet its a very common practice.
You are over simplifying it.
The regulation is being done at the wrong level of government and is entirely the wrong regulation at the local & state levels.
I'm curious, if you believe bribery works at the national level as well as the local level, how do regulations that are pro-consumer get passed?
In practice, I've found that the reason it works locally is almost no one is involved in local elections besides corporate sponsors. We literally had 10% turnout in my city, for instance.
Similarly, loop unbundling and other competition increasing regulation are almost always passed at the national level in basically every country that has such.
Hint: There isn't a rebuttal you can make because if it is true, then your argument is false. If it is false, it is an admission that federal regulations do actually function to increase competition to the benefit of consumers. There isn't a third option.
You don't seem to acknowledge the existence of private sector collusion either.
Suggestion: don't use circular logic when debating.
I acknowledge private sector collusion, and the answer is more competition. More regulation (usually influenced by the existing players) harms market entry. You need to constantly update the X & Y regulations so that start-ups have a fighting chance. That's painfully slow right now.
How exactly you manage the company that owns the last mile infrastructure can greatly affect how well this works, but even in the UK which has done this quite poorly, there are pretty much no place where you can't pick from dozens of ISPs.
It still imposes limits as to the maximum capacity, based on the upgrade schedules of OpenReach (BT) which controls the phone/adsl network. There are some problems. E.g. due to the way regulation is structured in the UK, BT frequently gets accused of milking OpenReach for money rather than invest in upgrades at the pace they ought to (basically because they earn far more from OpenReach than from their own ISP). One solution to this type of problem would be to regulate dividends from the line operator so that there is a limit set based on the amount invested in upgrades to make it pay to reinvest and/or to allow them a higher profit margin on upgraded services for a period.
OpenReach's wholesale prices are regulated roughly based on a cost+ basis, and are open and published on their websites for everyone to read.
Overall it does mean the ISP market is quite competitive, and entry costs for new ISPs are guaranteed to be relatively low, as e.g. there are "backhaul" services available that allow an ISP to get a connection to one or a few points in BTs network and have them hand over IP connections to subscribers at that point rather than having to do local loop unbundling across the country.
I have at least token influence over the behavior of my government. I do not have even the illusion of input into Comcast's iptables configuration.
In a truly competitive market it would be different. And I'd love to see a truly competive market. But as it stands, the alternative to government isn't freedom, it's unbounded and unchecked power by the cable monopolies to decide what the internet is and isn't. If someone's going to make that call, I'd rather it be someone I can vote against.
Ahh, but we accept the unbounded authority of law to dictate far more than our internet: our property, our freedom, and (unfortunately) our very lives. What reason is there to expect the government not to regulate every other aspect of life with data from the internet? At least Comcast can't do that.
The change process doesn't exist at all if the services that are offered by a company are entirely private, except by customer choice. And if there are too few choices, then well a monopoly ISP could ban encryption on all their offered links, and parse all the data going by for resale to marketers and right back to the government too - except perhaps for those inconvenient government privacy regulations (or other regulatory rules) which may stand in the way.
The issues are nearly entirely orthogonal. Network neutrality was pretty irrelevant to them installing boxes to spy on all our communications. It was irrelevant to using that data to decide whom is a communi... err terrorist. It will be irrelevant to when they decide to use that same data to limit your freedom.
We can argue how it got that way, but apparently nobody wants to fix that, so it's a pointless argument to have.
It's a lot easier and generates less noise than changing the rules to be openly biased while accomplishing the same thing.
Just look at what cable companies are doing after regulation requiring unencrypted basic cable service was removed. Companies are requiring users to rent a proprietary DTA; when their TVs already support clear QAM, so there is no valid analog spectrum freeing argument.
That deregulation was done by the FCC under different management than it is now (~2012 iirc) and in the declaration all of the commissioners were patting themselves on the back and saying what a huge win it was for consumers.
Now, 4 years later, the government is having to look at regulating set top boxes in general so that consumers can actually have choices, own the equipment in their home, and not be locked to a provider.
Probably this is not the FCC since its mandate is too broad. But if some such agency had the ability to force municipalities to allow private infrastructure investment, we might start to get the internet we want pretty quickly.
Also, cable companies and ISPs have consistently been rated terribly by consumers in recent years. Most citizens view these companies as utility providers and just want them to deliver cheap consistent service. Title II makes sense in that context.
This isn't true; the regulators are restricted by the law and by politics.
In the end, the power exists - political power is preserved - the only question is who controls it. For issues important to society, U.S. tradition is that power is allocated democratically. Americans take a vote; power is ultimately in the hands of the voters.
Every other potential authority is theoretically just as powerful and arbitrary, and usually in practice is more powerful and arbitrary (IMHO).
I agree about the risks; democracy is the worst possible system - until you look at the alternatives. What better alternative is there?
So your argument is "...but guys why would we want a utility to be treated like a utility!?"
You're entire premise is based around the idea that this regulation is fine because the "good guys" are in charge but what happens when "bad guys" are in charge. There for the only reasonable system is to limit the potential power of the "bad guys" by limiting effectiveness of government to a practically nonexistent state.
Well guess what, "bad guys" don't magically limit themselves to government.
(For the record here I'm defining "bad guys" as individuals, groups of individuals or organizations that would freely and willingly negatively affect the welfare of large groups of people for their own benefit. This could mean direct monetary gain, indirect gains from those that directly received them, societal gains, ideological or psychological gains from the feeling of imposing your will and views on others, etc. etc.)
It doesn't matter if we're talking about politics, commerce, religion, whatever. People like that are drawn to ANY institution that gives them the opportunity to advance their own interests. Hell we all do it to some degree. Some of us are obviously worse than others in both degree and extent.
The reason this regulation came about is many see the internet as a utility of great public interest. Meaning widespread, reliable, easy and cheap access to it has the potential of accelerating the growth and prosperity of our society and species as a whole. I hop I don't have to explain to you have worse off we would be without water, electricity, sewage and telephones being treated as public utilities.
In this instance that "bad guys" slithered their way not into the government side of the equation, but into business side. One of the only methods of countering "bad guys" in the market is classic free market principles. Free competition would mean "good guys" are able to enter the market and naturally drive the "bad guys" out. Invisible hand and all that jazz.
Reality does not often work like that though. It's far more complex. By using tactics to reduce competition such as buying up competitors or forcing them out of business, [mostly indirect] collusion to split up geographic markets, creating artificial barriers to entry, influencing regulation to prevent communities helping themselves, etc, they were able to carve out a pretty comfortable little position for themselves in the economy. That's not even mentioning the fact that even without all that some markets are inherently resistant to free market forces thanks to natural barriers to entry such as the the sheer difficulty and cost of laying physical lines.
Now these "bad guys" (note: obviously some excellent [mostly smaller] ISPs remain) are set up in a position to adversely affect the very prosperity of our society increasingly dependent on access to information and communication. I.e. fuck your start up and your ability to reach potential new customers because you're not peered with our "Lead Generation Package™", fuck your farm and any hope you had of learning new techniques because that site can only be reached with "Access Plus™" package, fuck xyz but please enjoy our own content network for Free™. Fuck you and whatever economic influence we might be having on your lives or businesses. Instead we're going to do all this mostly so you watch more of OUR TV SHOWS and ADVERTISEMENTS.
If i didn't find it so disturbing I would find it hilarious you used Brave New World in your argument AGAINST these regulations.
These regulation are important because with some things it doesn't matter who says them.
"DON'T FUCK WITH OUR PROSPERITY BUT FUCKING WITH PEOPLES ABILITY TO SHARE IDEAS AND INFORMATION"
That's what it comes down to and it's pretty simple.
After all if Hitler himself said "do not eat babies" you wouldn't throw your hands up in response "well looks like we need to ban any future possibility of anti baby eating rules if HITLER can say not to eat them."
If the FCC actually starts doing things you're talking THEN lets talk. It's a good thing we live in a system that lets us do that it's it?
The idea that there's some "magic bullet" that can limit the "bad guys" indefinitely is frankly juvenile at best. The idea that that "magic bullet" is limiting regulatory powers to non-existent is fucking absurd, "because "bad guys" only choose to slim their way into government" right?
The fact of the matter is the only thing that can stop "bad guys" is "good guys" having constant vigilance and a system of checks and balances that enables them to do something about it. In this case the voice of the "good guys" is being heard through sound public policy checking and balancing the power of large incumbent businesses.
The answer is not that much of a puzzle. Is very hard to dig water pipes, draw power lines, copper, and fiber without direct cooperation with of the government. Every single utility provider more or less exist because they had cooperation with government, and any current monopoly status is a product of that. Governments, be that US or any other nation, has a responsibility to limit the harm from such monopolies. They created the mess so they got to clean it up.
Personally, I would have preferred if the state created monopolies could be out-competed by deregulation of "good" radio frequencies, thus allowing for cheap nationwide wireless ISPs, but the furthest we got with that is the mobile networks and its arguable if it can be said to compete with the last mile monopolies and fiber networks. Speed, latency and coverage being difficult problems to solve with current technology and frequencies regulation.
Look at how this is solved in other places such as Canada or the UK where they instead force the ISPs to lease lines at reasonable rates. It's caused a massive shift in cost and speed of connections.
The "complete control" in the EU is very limited. The details vary by country, but the telecoms directive required each member state to ensure that access to the last mile was guaranteed. Most countries have opted for a solution where the incumbent was forced to separate out the operation and maintenance of the last mile infrastructure, regulated its prices on a cost plus basis and outlaw differentiated prices per provider, and provide access for competitors to lease space for equipment in local exchanges.
The rest of the ISP space is mostly unregulated.
What has been regulated is access to critical last-mile infrastructure. Nothing but cost stops people from building additional last-mile infrastructure.
In the UK, for example, we have numerous fibre ISPs operating their on physical infrastructure in the larger cities, where you can cover a lot of subscribers for relatively low cost, as well as Virgin Media (cable provider) that maintains their own cable infrastructure, and anyone can pay for access to install additional conduits.
But the point is you can start a competitive ISPs without it. In fact, due to backhaul (you can get IP handoff of your customers connections at a set of central locations rather than having to put your own equipment in), you can start an ISP very cheaply, and grow by adding equipment in exchanges as it becomes cost effective).
In fact, this solution has made control harder. E.g. the court decisions to block the Pirate Bay applies to a set of the largest providers only, presumably because they figured it was the most "bang for the buck" in terms of court costs. But pretty much anyone can choose from any of dozens of other ISPs without such blocks in place if they can't be bothered the hassle of working around it. Similarly the infamous "child porn filters", is something that the largest ISPs have been coerced to "voluntarily" sign up to, but because the government does not have the balls to try to push regulation of it through parliament, anyone who oppose the filters (good reason to: there's no oversight over what exactly is being filtered) can chose from dozens of ISPs that don't use them.
The FCC will now have the authority to do that for all Internet access, if they want to.
Up until now, only telephone companies were regulated as utilities, and they were indeed forced to lease access to their lines. I buy DSL service from a "CLEC" (competitive local exchange carrier)--a company that is leasing access to the existing phone network in my area.
But until this recent FCC ruling, the FCC did not have the same authority over cable networks, fiber networks, or wireless networks.
In a few years with this system in Canada I saw basically a 10x speed increase at very close prices and real competition over which ISP I'd go with.
I think this is a far better compromise, allow the market to do its job, just use minimal regulation to force the market to actually exist.
There were issues with implementation as well, AT&T* would commonly offer lower prices to consumers directly through wholesaling; which makes it pretty hard to compete
That said, I would prefer a return to the mandatory access regime as well.
* which was mostly SBC at the time
These issues are, very obviously, political; anyone claiming otherwise is either being deceitful or deeply in denial.
And the ISPs showed us why that's a terrible idea. Remember, no one was talking about net neutrality until the big ISPs decided they wanted to fuck with the internet.
- you want a dumb pipe that delivers the resource. there are very few distinguishing factors on which suppliers could compete
- basic enabling technology on which other amenities depend
- installation costs dominate. you're not paying for the photons or electrons
- everyone should be served, not just customers in lucrative locations
Certainly, internet access does not rank on the same level of maslow's hierarchy of needs as clean tap water, garbage disposal or electricity. But it shares many of the supply properties.
Kind of like what electric utilities already do with small growing industries.
It's not even vaguely a puzzle. There used to be a vibrant ISP market. Large existing companies destroyed it. The best case for most Americans is oligopoly; for many, there's effectively a monopoly.
Utility-style regulation is not as good as a vibrant market. But it's a lot better than monopolists stifling innovation and extracting monopoly rents.
It's not clear that's a bad thing, or that it's a worse state of affairs than the fast lane/slow lane rent-extraction schemes the telecoms clearly want. Cornering markets (be they capital, IP/copyright, infrastructure, etc) and extracting rent is a primary strategy of multinational corporations these days, and as wealth is increasingly concentrated into their hands, that is an increasingly viable strategy. The telecoms are working toward exactly this with the Internet.
>Or maybe it is mandated compliance with government snooping orders in the name of national security.
The telecoms running the internet have already brought us that [1]. Net neutrality is orthogonal to that problem.
>It might just work great as long as the good guys are in control. But what happens when it changes some day? And, if you think it cannot, then you have far, far more faith in human nature than I can possibly summon.
You seem to have far more faith in multinational corporate control of national economic infrastructure and the reliability of self-regulation via market forces than I can summon, especially in light of the continuous failures of both of those ideas in recent years - Enron/CA electrical infrastructure, GFC, IP/copyright, patent trolls, etc.
Hard to quantify the following assertion, but many concerned citizens sense the US government is still more accountable to citizens than large corporations are nowadays. The success of the crowd campaign for Net Neutrality is evidence, if not proof, of that. If there's a lesser of two evils here, it's FCC net neutrality rules, not a "free market" for what appears to be an unaccountable oligopoly-owned natural monopoly.
We can break it down quite simply.
- Being an ISP is not a high margin business.
- ISPs, like any other business, are always seeking ways to make more money.
- Charging sites for the privilege of traversing their infrastructure, or charging customers by the sites they load (the "cable TV" model, if you will) is a way to make more money, so ISPs want to do it.
- Consumers don't want to be charged more money for the same bits, and neither do the owners of large sites.
- Consumers have little to no choice of ISP, because being an ISP is very expensive, and as mentioned, it's pretty low profit (in the grand scheme of things.)
Pretty simple, really.
Sure, in an ideal world, we'd just be able to change to an ISP that fits our particular political bent (no traffic shaping/filtering/prioritizing for me, thanks!) but that world does not exist.
The idea, in short, is that free speech (meaning, in this case, unprioritized w/r/t bits) is more important than ISPs ability to make money. That's not the perfect scenario but it is the most acceptable one, given the world in which we live.
Americans have been working together to foster functioning and great societies through government for ages now. It's you that wants to test this brave new world.
Bottled water is often just tap water.
Flint Michigan has undrinkable water as a result of decades of mismanagement from the entrenched local politicians.
The water in my city makes me nauseous to drink, so I have to buy distilled in gallon or larger containers. It is fortunate that most of my water usage is showering.
Ah, but these are anecdotes.
> Americans have been working together to foster functioning and great societies through government for ages now. It's you that wants to test this brave new world.
The victims of the Drug War (primarily poor and minorities) must live ruined lives from this "functioning and great [society] through government for ages now."
They are just anecdotes.
World-class government sucks.
By not preventing monopolization of the ISP market. It might be a natural monopoly, in such case getting to such point is something to be expected. Monopoly must be regulated. You should better ask, why we got there only now, ignoring various monopolistic abuses before.
And you say "price controls" like that's a bad thing. It's not. Honestly, I wouldn't even be opposed to the federal government just nationalizing every ISP and carrier in the country.
The majority opinion directly addresses your concerns.
The majority opinion explicitly and unambiguously REJECTS the line of legal reasoning you claim it upholds, and definitely does NOT grant the FCC "plenary" regulatory authority over the internet.
The court carefully points out that is not granting the FCC any authority that was not explicitly granted by the legislative and executive branches. If you don't like net neutrality, take it up with the legislative and executive branches.
There is no slippery slope here, any more or less than democracy itself is a slippery slope.
In short, your reading of the majority opinion is patently incorrect.
Is this decision good or bad for us?
"No Blocking: broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
"No Throttling: broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
"No Paid Prioritization: broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind—in other words, no "fast lanes." This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates."
This is a good thing. Big telcos have been trying to gut the FCC of its power ever since they issued their Open Internet Order: https://www.fcc.gov/general/open-internet
Next stop is the supreme court if they continue to push back against it.
That doesn't just mean the ability to impose penalties (which is part of it) but also means the power to know what's going on so that penalties can be imposed.
What do you imagine it doesn't have that it needs with regard to the Open Internet Order in this area?
[0]http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/08/obama-golfs-with... [1]http://www.nationalreview.com/article/375116/how-comcast-bou...
Comcast sued and the FCC spent the next eight years fighting.
[0]http://littlesis.org/person/2261/Brian_L_Roberts/political
> Have you known corporations in America to suffer consequences of significant magnitude for illegal actives of late?
Well, if we're staying with the FCC, this would seem to qualify: https://www.fcc.gov/document/att-mobility-faces-100m-fine-mi.... The FCC fined AT&T $100 M for violation of an Open Internet rule--the FCC found that they essentially "mislabeled" their broadband Internet service as'unlimited' without disclosing that speeds would be throttled after a user exceeded a certain soft cap. $100 M seems to me like a pretty robust fine for that kind of violation.
[0] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-63A1.pd... (para. 38)
During the day now: 72 Mb/s In the evenings: 7Mb/s In the evenings, with my employer's VPN turned on: 66Mb/s
(I'm on Comcast)
7 hu-0-10-0-1-pe04.56marietta.ga.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.83.182) 22.233 ms 11.978 ms 10.577 ms
8 a104-72-128-31.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com (104.72.128.31) 11.783 ms 11.075 ms 18.287 ms
While this happens with many providers, Comcast is about the worst offender. They are quite happy to allow peering links to remain full at peak indefinitely - it's a way to put pressure on the content networks to pay for access to their routes over a private peering session. If you're a major web hosting operation, your customers will demand great performance to Comcast. They don't really care that Comcast is strong-arming paid peering agreements via those demands. It's especially awesome because Comcast generally charges more for bits to their tiny portion of the Internet, than what you pay for bits to a major backbone for the full table.
Basically certain ISPs refuse to increase connection capacity with backbone providers like level3. Instead they (Comcast) is trying to get Netflix to connect directly with them and charge them a premium in doing so.
Peering agreements have never really been part of a truly "neutral" Internet.
There basically isn't. Otherwise they just underprovision the default link so that anything using it is de facto throttled and the only alternative is peering.
> This ruling doesn't mean Comcast must allow Netflix to put servers in Comcast's datacenters.
Peering doesn't require putting servers in your datacenter. Peering means Netflix brings fiber to Comcast's datacenter and Comcast plugs it into one of their network ports.
There probably should be some regulation of ISP peering but it just doesn't fall under net neutrality. If anything it's sort of against net neutrality. A small startup would have pay for a CDN or a transit and netflix gets it for free? Just because they are big.
They don't get anything for free that the little guy doesn't. They're just doing their own transit instead of paying somebody else to do it. Nobody is saying Netflix can peer with Comcast in California for Comcast customers in New England. They have to bring the traffic into the region, whether by paying someone for transit or by building their own transit network. Comcast just can't charge them for access to the last mile, and neither can it charge anybody else (like the transit providers who provide service to the little guy).
And there is a very real difference between peering agreements and throttling. The effect in both cases is slower Netflix, but they are completely different, from a technology and practical standpoint. "Basically the same" doesn't pass muster when it comes to something like this, which is ruled entirely by subtlety and nuance.
No, I'm being specific about what Comcast should be obliged to do. If you bring fiber to their regional NOC they should have to deliver the traffic to their regional customers. It doesn't matter what Netflix is actually doing right now -- they probably wouldn't be doing it if Comcast hadn't made it a requirement for high bandwidth access to their customers.
> And there is a very real difference between peering agreements and throttling. The effect in both cases is slower Netflix, but they are completely different, from a technology and practical standpoint.
No they aren't, they're completely identical. There is utterly no difference between throttling a port down to 100Mbps and intentionally using a 100Mbps port. The only thing you can even argue is that in theory a 10Gbps port would be more expensive, but it's more expensive by an amortized annual cost of something like $50. It's a negligible amount of money which is several orders of magnitude off from what Comcast wants to charge for peering.
Literally neither of the things you said should be forced to happen have been requested by Netflix or Comcast.
Netflix didn't want to pay anything for housing Netflix's server in Comcast's datacenter, rather than continue to pay Comcast for their peering agreement and network upgrades required to honor their peering agreement.
Comcast said "no", and stopped peering with Netflix (very briefly was this actually happening, Netflix quickly acquiesced). This sent Netflix's traffic to Comcast users over the greater Internet, which is slower. THIS rerouting is what caused the slowdown, not any slowing via network devices. The Internet, as a whole, is slower than a direct connection between Comcast and Netflix. That's the whole reason for peering agreements, after all. Comcast never targeted Netflix with any kind of slowness, with hardware or software.
So again, I'm confused why you think this has anything to do with "running fiber" or "intentionally using a 100Mbps port". Neither of those things have happened.
So if Comcast doesn't peer with Netflix then the only way for Netflix traffic to get to Comcast customers is to travel via some network Comcast does peer with, like Level 3. The problem is, this gives Comcast monopoly power. However much Netflix traffic has to get from Netflix to Comcast customers, so regardless of which peer that traffic comes through, Comcast absent regulation can charge them monopoly rents in exchange for not having a link which is too slow to carry the traffic.
There is no inherent need for Netflix servers to be anywhere near Comcast. Netflix could put their servers in Amazon and pay Level 3 to deliver the traffic to Comcast, which is what they used to do. The problem is then Comcast can charge Level 3 the monopoly rents which Level 3 would then have to pass on and make the arrangement unprofitable, which is what Comcast wants because then Netflix is forced to buy those services from Comcast at higher prices.
Now suppose Comcast has to do free peering with anybody. Then Level 3 can get free peering (i.e. bring fiber to Comcast) and Netflix can pay Amazon and Level 3 (or Microsoft and Cogent or anybody else). They can even continue buying from Comcast, but would only do that if Comcast charges competitive rates instead of monopoly rents -- which is the whole point.
The person I replied to asked if Netflix is able to stop paying Comcast. I responded that, since refusing a peering agreement is not the same as throttling, the implication is Netflix will likely continue to have to pay Comcast.
I fail to see how any of what you've written here has much to do with your claim that peering agreements and throttling are the same thing.
To be clear to anyone else reading this, they absolutely are not. They're just literally different terms for different things. From Wikipedia:
> Bandwidth throttling is the intentional slowing of Internet service by an Internet service provider. [0]
> In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network. [1]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_throttling
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering
Not throttling and peering arrangements (with unrestricted bandwidth) are completely identical. Or if you want to be pedantic, not peering (or peering at limited bandwidth) is a type of throttling.
That's what throttling is. A device between two fast pipes that lowers the speed they can exchange data.
That's also not at all what peering agreements are.
Which part of it did they not do?
> That's also not at all what peering agreements are.
Peering agreements mean plugging the pipes into the device. Not having peering agreements means unplugging some of the capacity, which has the effect of throttling.
I'm not really sure why you're so insistent on this sophistry. There are pipes with enough capacity from Netflix to Comcast. There are pipes with enough capacity from Comcast to its customers. Anything they do in that Comcast building which prevents the traffic from flowing at full speed is going to be equivalent to throttling.
You claimed this wasn't true, and you are wrong. I don't want anyone to get the incorrect idea that what you're saying is correct, because it is in no way true. No one (not Netflix, Comcast, the US government, or Wikipedia) but you considers peering agreements (or not having them) to be "literally the same" as throttling.
This ruling was about whether the FCC has the authority to regulate ISPs as telecommunications carriers. It seems that they do. Which presumably means that the FCC could require last mile providers to do free peering. And they should, even though they haven't yet.
This ruling was specific, and its specific nature did not preclude Comcast from continuing to enter into paid-for peering agreements with Netflix. You are wrong to say or imply that Netflix will now, as a result of this ruling, be able to peer with Comcast for free.
Objectively wrong.
> No, I'm being specific about what Comcast should be obliged to do.
What I don't see is anything from me that says "Netflix will now, as a result of this ruling, be able to peer with Comcast for free."
The closest you can come to that is this:
> Comcast just can't charge them for access to the last mile, and neither can it charge anybody else (like the transit providers who provide service to the little guy).
But that was in response to a post hypothesizing that Netflix getting free peering would be problematic, i.e. argued under the hypothetical that that policy was in effect.
You're arguing with a straw man.
This ruling upholds the FCC's prohibition on throttling content.
If throttling and (not) peering are the same thing, then Comcast would be forced to peer with Netflix for free. They couldn't not do it.
Therefore, you are arguing that Netflix will be able to peer with Comcast for free, even if you aren't actually saying those words.
This is untrue. Netflix is not going to be able to peer with Comcast for free. You were and are wrong.
No strawman, just you trying very hard not to be wrong.
Not peering is still throttling.
> If throttling and (not) peering are the same thing, then Comcast would be forced to peer with Netflix for free. They couldn't not do it.
They would be forced to peer with Netflix, not necessarily for free. That's the problematic part of the rule that needs to be fixed, because it allows Comcast to charge monopoly rents for peering even though peering has minimal costs.
Are you honestly arguing that if Comcast refused to connect Netflix (or anyone with sufficient bandwidth for Netflix) to Comcast customers at any price, that wouldn't be throttling and wouldn't get Comcast in trouble?
This ruling upholds the FCC's prohibition on throttling content.
If throttling and (not) peering are the same thing, then Comcast would be forced to peer with Netflix for free. They couldn't not do it. Therefore, you are arguing that Netflix will be able to peer with Comcast for free, even if you aren't actually saying those words.
This is untrue. Netflix is not going to be able to peer with Comcast for free. You were and are wrong.
No strawman, just you trying very hard not to be wrong.
I haven't intended to take a position on what the FCC rule actually does because it's 200 pages of legalese, which is enough to make "objectively wrong" an impossibility. There is enough there for some pedantic jackass to argue anything about anything and the only way to sort it out is another court opinion about specifically that thing. What I don't appreciate is you putting words in my mouth. What I've argued is that not peering is throttling, which it is, but not what the legal implications of that would be, which are open to interpretation.
However, the argument you've made that if not peering is throttling then Comcast would have to do free peering is not at all ridiculous. It's just not a sure thing. The ISP would be able to argue that they will do peering just not for free, and then it flips into paid prioritization since prioritization is the opposite of throttling.
That's more moving parts than I would prefer to see. Too many opportunities for the ISP to try to weasel out of it. It would be a lot simpler if the FCC would just say "last mile ISPs are required to do free peering with anyone" and avoid the whole mess. But it's a fair argument that could succeed, and if it did would fit entirely with the spirit of the rule.
Which you seem to think makes that outcome some kind of an impossibility, but with reasoning no more substantial than "you're wrong" over and over again with no coherent justification.
You can't sell 50Mbit to a thousand people and then only provide a 100Mbit backbone, just as an electrical utility can't sell you a 300A hookup and only wire up 30AWG, or have voltage drop to half when people in your neighborhood happen to turn on their dryer.
The ISP world right now is the fucking wild west, selling "up to 50Mbits" only to have 10 arrive (just based on line attenuation!), overselling capacity of shared networks like cable 100 times over causing consistent, measurable and repeatable drop at peak times, modifying network traffic to insert "supercookies" (can you imagine USPS opening all mail) and configuring default DNS servers that hijack NXDOMAIN for malware infected websites to make a quick buck.
Up to is fine; but how much will I get when everyone wants to use it at once? Be honest, tell me a 'safe' number (this means pad it just a little, at least).
Violating this number on a repeating, particularly repeatable basis, means that the portion of the bill which is going to pay for infrastructure upkeep (including expansion) needs to go to fixing this problem.
Failure to have an expedient plan (parts on order by the end of the next business week, maintenance scheduled 'soon') for resolving this should lead to daily fines.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/0...
Maybe I'm wrong but we'll see.
More likely the next stop is Congress. Reversing basically everything the FCC has done with the internet and making sure the FCC does not do any such things again is a major goal of the Republicans and they currently have majorities in the House and the Senate.
Their presumptive presidential nominee, Trump, is also against net neutrality, seeing it as a liberal attack on conservatives: "Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media" [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...
Well, if by "next" you mean "previous, current, next, and always"; Republicans in the Congress have been pushing to explicitly prohibit FCC Open Internet action since before the 2010 Open Internet Report and Order. The only thing they've gone after more has been the Affordable Care Act.
But that's a different track than the legal challenges, which have been the only place where neutrality opponents have had concrete victories in the past.
In the absence of a clear definition of "favor", this could also make it difficult for ISPs to host CDNs, or caching servers provided by content providers. If you put Netflix's caching box on your network, in some sense that "favors" Netflix traffic. And yet doing so is good for Netflix, the ISP, and the customer.
For that matter, there's nothing wrong with a CDN giving an ISP money to host a server on their network, if the balance of costs between the CDN and the ISP works out that way. An early-stage CDN or site-specific CDN might well have to do that to get started.
a) The ISP's own systems do not discriminate for or against the traffic from that edge server (i.e. no rules on Comcast's routers to slow down netflix.com while speeding up nbc.com).
b) The ISP offers the same edge server hosting deal to anyone who wants it.
Big ISPs now own content companies, so even if they don't lease space to Netflix, they would still have edge caching servers on their networks--their own. The neutrality rule seeks to ensure that they don't shape their network traffic to degrade content from other providers who don't own the wires and routers.
Also, T-Mobile is arguably violating non-netrality with its Binge service. The FCC has thus far refused to rule against them. T-Mobile claims this cannot be throttling because you can opt-out of it at any time and upstream providers are not being charged. Seems like this could a slippery slope for wired ISPs to follow.
On top of that, I'm a AT&T u-verse customer who recently cut his TV service with U-verse. I was told that I now have a strict data cap, when before I had unlimited because of that. I would like to see the FCC address these situations as cord-cutting becomes popular. I have a FireTV now with Playstation Vue and HBO Now for at least 1/2 the price of U-verse tv.
The actual "net neutrality" win is nice, but this means that the FCC has power to tweak the regulations in the future when Verizon/Comcast/AT&T come up with some new shitty way to monetize their customers.
But these net neutrality rules won't really make the Internet "better" in the U.S., until the ISPs get much better competition, mainly at the local level. Right now this is often not possible because of "other regulations" that essentially give exclusive rights/monopoly to an ISP over a certain area.
If you want "better Internet", eliminating those local monopolies should be the main goal for policy changes going forward. It's something Republicans should vigorously support as well (free market!), but for some reason (read: campaign donations) they do not.
Cable TV Franchises as Barriers to Video Competition
(Ok, so some people on here would argue that any regulation on internet is a slippery slope, but I wouldn't worry about that from the FCC. Now, if congress starts weighing in, that's a different story.)
Typically, ISPs in the US are either small and barely-profitable or large and with little appetite for business or technical innovation. The largest content providers already effectively share revenue with the largest ISPs through paid-peering and other arrangements. The smaller players, those that with success could grow and advance the market, are too small to justify the time of content providers that are also very worried about setting a dangerous precedent by extending the same deals to them that they extend to the AT&Ts and Comcasts.
Sure, as consumers we get additional protections, but I fear this mostly ensures that the industry as a whole stays put.
That was 100% the point of Net Neutrality. It is so that the Internet doesn't change. Otherwise we will have a barrier of entry for all the small businesses. The Internet is a free market that needs to stay that way.
The whole idea of net neutrality is that content creators can't pay ISPs for preferential treatment. This means that the large ISPs won't be receiving payouts from Netflix and suchlike, and therefore won't have an advantage in this area over smaller ISPs.
If you really want to push for competition, there are other options. I don't know much about the situation in the US, but in the UK we have local-loop unbundling (LLU), which has proven to be a success in driving forward competition in the ISP market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
LLU helps smaller ISPs to compete with larger ISPs, as it allows them to build up their infrastructure without duplicating the work of laying cables. From the Wikipedia page I just linked to it appears that LLU is at least legal in the US, I'd be interested to learn about how popular it is.
Ah, I see where you've got things mixed up now. Net neutrality stops the need for content providers to share revenue with ISPs. They have no financial interest in doing so, therefore the practice won't continue, it will stop.
Normally as a business you are required to purchase bandwidth from bandwidth providers. I would assume this would still stand.
What counts as throttling? If an ISP has multiple peering connections with backbone providers are they forced to upgrade their hardware to compensate for all the traffic coming from their peer? If so, what counts as sufficient quality?
If they upgrade some peering connections and not others is that breaking Net Neutrality?
My understanding, not sure if it is correct, was that Netflix had traffic on an Internet backbone and Comcast was selectively throttling traffic within the peering connection based on whether it was Netflix traffic. I can see how that is discriminatory and wrong.
Anyone have more details about how all this works specifically?
I see a parallel there to how the health insurance situation in America seems to have played out over the last few years from the view point of the average middle class developer.
The thing is... I like them preferentially treating YouTube and Netflix traffic by not counting it towards my bandwidth limit. The "fair" alternative sucks: I would simply not stream on my phone anymore because it would be too expensive.
The authentication of pay services is outside the purvue of Net Neutrality.
Is that paid prioritization / a fast lane? Or is that just purchasing a better plan?
Where is the line drawn?
If you're worried about tens of milliseconds worth of latency, you don't route your traffic over the public internet.
What I really want is something akin to guarantees on the bandwidth, or something like 95%ile billing. Why should I pay for something that I'm not being given (and yes, before people start saying it's legal because of the contract, I'm not arguing that, I'm saying they're selling 50, I'm getting 20, consistently.)
"Notably, the Open Internet Order does not affect zero-rating services like T-Mobile's BingeOn or Verizon's Go90, which are intentionally left out of the scope of the order. "I can argue there are some aspects of [zero rating] that are good, and I can argue there’s some aspects of it that are not so good," Wheeler told The Verge in an interview in March. "The job of the regulator is to figure out, 'Okay, now how do I deal with this?'"
Outrageous behavior, followed up by outrageous commentary. This FCC is out of control. How does anyone invest in wireless with regulators like this? Is Tom Wheeler even aware of the chilling affect of commentary like this?
Edit: The quote above is from the fine article.
Wmeredith: I'm talking about is Tom Wheeler, chair of the FCC. In this particular quote, the regulator of the laws is saying (at least as far as I can tell), that he's going to pick and choose which players he regulates. Should I assume you're arguing that my quote from the article is fud, or is it my commentary? Or my interpretation of it?
I'm not being a troll. I have an honest disagreement that this is the right thing to do. Would you invest in any climate with a regulator who says things like this? It seems wildly more risky to me.
The FCC's Open Internet Order explicitly bans this behavior, but it only applies to wired connections. They did not issue any ruling on wireless internet, so several wireless providers offer these unmetered fast lanes (i.e. stream content from certain providers without it counting against your bandwidth limit). It's a short term win for customers, but they lose in the long run.
Zero-rating services aren't traffic prioritization, and the Open Internet Order forbids paid prioritization anyway. What they are is paid deals where data from one service isn't counted against data caps, which is a different form of favoritism.
> You can't compete against Netflix with T-Mobile users because Netflix's traffic gets priority.
No, you can't compete against Netflix with T-Mobile users (without making a similar deal with T-Mobile) because your data-intensive service will be charged against a limited usage quota while Netflix's won't.
Edit: It's also worth noting that participation in the programs is free both for the provider and end user.
Zero-rating your own (or subsidiary, or partners') traffic is a way of increasing the perceived costs to your end-users for traffic which is not as profitable to you. That reduces demand for the less-profitable traffic, thus allowing your profit margin to increase. Meanwhile, you get to spin the message to customers as "this stuff is free!" rather than "we built the cost of this stuff in to your monthly bill, and anything else gets counted against your quota".
In other words, if T-Mobile is giving Pandora privileges on the network that any mom-and-pop startup streaming service doesn't have access to, does it really matter if T-Mobile is charging the customer for that? Since it still effectively stifles innovation by new players (a core tenet of Wheeler's net neutrality argument).
Is there a problem if Pandora were to offer an overage-fee rebate benefit to T-Mobile customers? It's effectively the same thing, except they are paying end users rather than the middle-man. I personally don't see a problem with that and that makes me think that the simpler option of just paying the middle-man (T-Mobile) for zero-rating should be okay as well.
Yes, because it's clearly the same thing, and it has the same problem.
Suppose the ISP owns or has some "unrelated" partnership with Pandora. Now the money Pandora is "paying" is just money the ISP is passing back to them under the table through the other relationship, and the ISP is really only disadvantaging Pandora's competitors because the ISP stands to collect some of the rents from thwarting competition.
I track each of my customer's usage, figure out from IP addresses how much of their usage was on their T-Mobile connection, and rebate them my estimate of what T-Mobile will charge them for that usage.
Is there a problem with this? If so, how would you address it?
2. Similar to #1, except now my subscription service includes a bandwidth limit. A given subscription plan is allowed a specified amount of music data per month from my servers. Again, I have no relationship with T-Mobile or any other carrier other than some of my customers using those carriers to access my servers.
Each month I buy each customer a prepaid data card for their carrier with sufficient bandwidth to cover one month of their subscription to my service.
Is there a problem? If so, how would you address it?
Netflix has a program where they will place servers inside an ISP's network. This allows them to deliver video without paying a third party for transit. If this lowers their costs, they could theoretically pass those savings on to the customers of that ISP (Google Fiber customers, for example). I wonder if Netflix offering their service to those customers for $5 / month and other ISP customers for $10 / month would be a net neutrality violation?
The same goes for movies on YouTube. Because Google doesn't have to pay for transit, they could undercut Amazon and Apple. Is charging less because their costs are less anti-competitive?
But let's just put the final nail in the coffin here. Does the music service want to pay their customers $1 for every gigabyte of music their customers listen to? Fine, pay it regardless of what the customer's ISP charges for bandwidth, the same amount to any customer on any ISP. If doing that is profitable then it's profitable regardless of what the ISP charges the customer, it's better for the music service because it doesn't give the ISP any pricing leverage on bandwidth charges, and if paying the customer money to encourage them to use the service works for customers with per-byte billing then it should work just as well for customers with unlimited plans, so the proposal will earn them even more customers.
It might be the same problem, but it isn't the same thing. Who would the FCC fine?
Also, you're trying to have it both ways. You're also asking what the difference is between if the music service does it and if the ISP does it. The difference is that while both are bad the FCC can fine the ISP for doing it.
As for the hypothetical where a service will reimburse for fees (like my bank does when I use out-of-network ATMs), I have a hard time seeing any FTC issue.
Why are you assuming that? Zero-rating raises barriers to entry which reduces competition. Less competition harms consumers.
> As for the hypothetical where a service will reimburse for fees (like my bank does when I use out-of-network ATMs), I have a hard time seeing any FTC issue.
Let's fit the analogy and see if you can spot it then. The ATMs are the ISPs and the ISPs have regional monopolies, so suppose there is one company that owns every ATM in California. Furthermore the government prohibits anyone else from constructing any ATMs in California.
The ATM company is also a bank. The ATM company is prohibited from favoring its own bank and charging its customers lower ATM fees, so instead the ATM company charges the same fees but the ATM company's bank offers to refund them. Do you see the trouble now? It's just a sham transaction to skirt the rule. And then the ATM company can raise its ATM fees to a hundred dollars because its bank's customers aren't paying them and it wants the other banks to go out of business.
I'm having a hard time seeing that. If I have two kids and I reward one with some candy, that's not the same as punishing the other one.
Harm to competition comes from imbalance, which doesn't require punishment. Reinforcement works just as well.
They've been consulting with the industry to try to figure out which aspects of zero rating are helpful and which are (or have the potential to be) harmful. That's what a good regulator should do.
The original Verge article describes all of this. Perhaps you'd care to read it.
If your idea of "innovation" is to throttle, block, and otherwise act in an un-neutral manner, I don't want you to invest in wireless. I want you to leave it for someone who will be neutral with the traffic.
Also, he didn't say he was going to pick and choose. Unless by "pick and choose", you mean he's going to go after those who are breaking the rules, and leave those who aren't alone.